“Three animals hunted by the lord in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ were…”

No power at home since Monday evening, thanks to Sandy. I’m snatching a moment from office hours at my (inland) school to do a post that really needs no comment.

This is one student’s answer to a little 3-point gimmee on the Midterm Exam (well, I thought it was a gimmee…).

“Three animals hunted by the lord in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight were a rooster, a fox, and a wild bore.”

Okay, a brief comment. The lord hunted, in order, a deer, a boar, and a fox. I think the rooster sneaked into this student’s memory by way of Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” which featured a rooster and a fox. The boar should have gotten into the answer, and might have if the student had been a close reader instead of primarily an in-class listener.

I think this is a wild bore in the sense of a feral bore–running around, sometimes running amok, chasing people (to bore them), sleeping on their porches and stealing food from the dog’s dish (oh, Murphy, not YOURS! don’t worry, I know you could handle a wild bore if one came and tried to get your dinner!). This bore has escaped into the general population and will do harm if we let him. If we could catch him and put him in a cage, then people could go to see him when they wanted to be bored, and could go away from him before they got bored to death.

UB strike
An archive of the events, documents, and correspondence of the faculty strike at the University of Bridgeport 1990-1992, the longest strike in academic history. If you don’t know this story, you should!

UB strike
An archive of the events, documents, and correspondence of the faculty strike at the University of Bridgeport 1990-1992, the longest strike in academic history. If you don’t know this story, you should!